Pagan Papers | Page 7

dog. Arcades ambo -- loafers
likewise -- they lie there in the warm dust, each outside his own door,
ready to return the smallest courtesy. Their own lords and masters are
not given to the exchange of compliments nor to greetings in the
market-place. The dog is generally the better gentleman, and he is
aware of it; and he duly appreciates the loafer, who is not too proud to
pause a moment, change the news, and pass the time of day. He will
mark his sense of this attention by rising from his dust-divan and
accompanying his caller some steps on his way. But he will stop short
of his neighbour's dust-patch; for the morning is really too hot for a
shindy. So, by easy stages (the street is not a long one: six dogs will see
it out), the Loafer quits the village; and now the world is before him.
Shall he sit on a gate and smoke? or lie on the grass and smoke? or

smoke aimlessly and at large along the road? Such a choice of
happiness is distracting; but perhaps the last course is the best -- as
needing the least mental effort of selection. Hardly, however, has he
fairly started his first daydream when the snappish ``ting'' of a bellkin
recalls him to realities. By comes the bicyclist: dusty, sweating, a
piteous thing to look upon. But the irritation of the strepitant metal has
jarred the Loafer's always exquisite nerves: he is fain to climb a gate
and make his way towards solitude and the breezy downs.
Up here all vestiges of a sordid humanity disappear. The Loafer is
alone with the south-west wind and the blue sky. Only a carolling of
larks and a tinkling from distant flocks break the brooding noonday
stillness; above, the wind-hover hangs motionless, a black dot on the
blue. Prone on his back on the springy turf, gazing up into the sky, his
fleshy integument seems to drop away, and the spirit ranges at will
among the tranquil clouds. This way Nirvana nearest lies. Earth no
longer obtrudes herself; possibly somewhere a thousand miles or so
below him the thing still ``spins like a fretful midge.'' The Loafer
knows not nor cares. His is now an astral body, and through golden
spaces of imagination his soul is winging her untrammelled flight. And
there he really might remain for ever, but that his vagrom spirit is
called back to earth by a gentle but resistless, very human summons, --
a gradual, consuming, Pantagruelian, god-like, thirst: a thirst to thank
Heaven on. So, with a sigh half of regret, half of anticipation, he bends
his solitary steps towards the nearest inn. Tobacco for one is good; to
commune with oneself and be still is truest wisdom; but beer is a thing
of deity -- beer is divine.
Later the Loafer may decently make some concession to popular taste
by strolling down to the river and getting out his boat. With one paddle
out he will drift down the stream: just brushing the flowering rush and
the meadow-sweet and taking in as peculiar gifts the varied sweets of
even. The loosestrife is his, and the arrow-head: his the distant moan of
the weir; his are the glories, amber and scarlet and silver, of the
sunset-haunted surface. By-and-by the boaters will pass him
homeward-bound. All are blistered and sore: his withers are unwrung.
Most are too tired and hungry to see the sunset glories; no corporeal
pangs clog his æsthesis -- his perceptive faculty. Some have quarrelled
in the day and are no longer on speaking terms; he is at peace with

himself and with the whole world. Of all that lay them down in the
little village that night, his sleep will be the surest and the sweetest. For
not even the blacksmith himself will have better claim to have earned a
night's repose.
Cheap Knowledge
When at times it happens to me that I 'gin to be aweary of the sun, and
to find the fair apple of life dust and ashes at the core -- just because,
perhaps, I can't afford Melampus Brown's last volume of poems in
large paper, but must perforce condescend upon the two-and-sixpenny
edition for the million -- then I bring myself to a right temper by
recalling to memory a sight which now and again in old days would
touch the heart of me to a happier pulsation. In the long, dark winter
evenings, outside some shop window whose gaslight flared brightest
into the chilly street, I would see some lad -- sometimes even a girl --
book in hand, heedless of cold and wet, of aching limbs and straining
eyes, careless of jostling passers-by, of rattle and turmoil behind them
and about, their happy spirits far